whenever I install 98se I always setup the hard drive from a boot floopy. This time the floopy was dead, so I booted from my Me cd. I was able to run fdisk, delete partistion, create primary dos partion, set it as active, create extended partistion, and create drives. Afterward I reboot to the Me cd and tried to format c: as I have done many times with the boot floopy, but got "bad command". Finnally gave up & found a good floopy was able to format and install. Why couldn't I format c: from the cd? larry

'Bad command or file name' means the command is not in the current directory or the path. Booting from the cd usually creates a Ramdrive at A: You'd expect the format command to be there. You may want to boot from the cd again and look through the various directories available to you to see if the command is missing or is somewhere else.

If it's like the 98SE CD then format.com file is actually located within the Win98 folder on the disc. So on me it should be in ME's folder.

Unless it's an upgrade....... Should be in one of the .cab files somewhere, and you should be able to extract it. I didn't go through with this, but I was able to open one or two of the first couple of .cab files on one of my ME UPGRADE cd's, the in some of the EBD files is format, sys, etc. You should be able to extract these, if they aren't listed in runnable form.

I wouldn't normally touch an upgrade disc with a 20ft barge poll :P. But then again the price is much cheaper for one :P.

Actually, after you learn a few tricks, upgrade cd's are sorta OK. The reason I have several ME upgrades, is that's just how things worked out. A couple came with used systems I obtained, at least one was bought, complete, at a garage sale for cheap. There are ways to do a "clean install" with an upgrade CD, and since I've got PLENTY of W95-98 lying about........

thanks for all the suggestions, I will try some out next time I find myself in a similar situation thankyou larry